The German city of Freiburg has been using OpenOffice 3.2.1, which is an open-source productivity suite that is used as an alternative to Microsoft Office, for the past five years. The city has announced that it plans to ditch the open-source office suite and return to Microsoft Office after running into numerous problems.

Some of the issues cited by the city council include documents that were improperly formatted when opened in another office suite and conversion problems between presentation programs PowerPoint and Impress. The Council also felt that Calc and Impress performed significantly more poorly than Microsoft alternatives.

"The divergence of the development community (LibreOffice on one hand Apache Office on the other) is crippling for the development for OpenOffice," the council wrote.

The Free Software Foundation Europe, the Document Foundation, and the Open Source Business Alliance protested the city Council's findings. The groups said that the city Council was comparing apples to oranges.

"Numerous statements concerning LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice are incorrect or outdated," the groups said in the letter. They also added that the support of LibreOffice and OpenOffice is at a professional level these days. The group continued saying, "The assessment of the evaluation that compatibility to Microsoft Office cannot be reached in the next few years, is also wrong."

It's worth noting that while Microsoft Office 2013 hit RTM status in October, Freiburg will be using a combination of Office 2000 and Office 2010.

Office 2000 is fine. If it was 97 then there would be numerous problems, but 2000 is fine. Microsoft has actually been very good with versioning their file extensions so compatibility is maintained e.g. I can create a MDB file in 2000 or 2002-2003 format and compatibility is maintained regardless of versions.

In fact, the majority of data analysis tools that I write I utilize 2000 file formats unless specific, newer functionality is required.

"Microsoft has actually been very good with versioning their file extensions so compatibility is maintained e.g. I can create a MDB file in 2000 or 2002-2003 format and compatibility is maintained regardless of versions."

ONLY if you don't care about opening the file on a Mac. MS have never been able to get the fancier features of Word to operate correctly on Mac. Open a file containing Chinese, or mathematics, or fancy graphics, and you are doing well if poor formatting is your only problem --- more likely you simply won't be able to read what's there.

It feels like kicking them when they are down to point this out, but EVERY FSCKING PROBLEM with MS boils down to the same thing --- an unwillingness to EVER accept a tiny amount of inconvenience today for the sake of a better future. So we get UI issues, bugs, stupid file formats, endlessly propagated forwards because no-one ever has the guts to say NO.